Sugar Sammy

I’m writing my blog about a Canadian stand up comedian, Sugar Sammy. He’s not the most famous comedian, as none of you probably have even heard of him, but he is starting to get his name out there in Canada. In the routine he did for Comedy Now! Sugar Sammy uses his own race and other peoples’ to make fun of. Many comedians go over the black and white thing, but he is Indian and it gives it a nice twist from other racial stand ups. He starts talking about women towards the end of the routine. He tells the audience what kind of a woman he likes, and they are all pretty good qualities, but then he makes this really bad comment that would be offensive if it weren’t a joke. Good approach to get the audience in a good mood before insulting them. If it bounced off and was offensive, he followed up with right after making fun of his people, so it would make it OK to make fun of others. After that he goes into arranged marriage because it is normal in India and his parents want him to get one. In the beginning of this joke he makes it extremely inappropriate for the audience and almost puts them in a very uncomfortable situation. Again when it gets to an extreme point and turns it into a ridiculous situation that nobody could ever think of. I think Sugar Sammy is so funny because he’s quite unexpected. He’s a jerk and mean to his audience but always recovers nicely and comes out with a blast. The routine in general is all racial with all kinds of twists and turns, mostly focusing on the “outsiders” races, such as “brown” people and Latino’s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w-6IeUl35o&NR=1

Brain Ninjas

Dane Cook is arguably the most successful comedian there is at the moment. My favourite stand-up by him is Vicious Circle. It’s a typical Dane Cook show, absolutely ridiculous. His style of comedy is based on stories that can both have the possibility to be true, or total bogus. What makes his comedy so effective though, is the way we could all put ourselves into the shoes of those stories. Often the stories are situations we have all been in, so the audience can relate to what he’s talking about. The way he makes these stories funny and entertaining is by pointing out the obvious and throwing everything we don’t want to admit or be honest about, right on the table and that’s that, no arguing. In the particular section of Vicious Circle that I want to talk about he talks about relationships, and why women win 99.9% of all fights. He claims that women are brain ninjas, and that they strategically say things to make men go crazy in the end. The way he tells this story is by explaining how both men and women react and want to feel. What he says men want in a fight and what women want in a fight and how they want to make the other feel is so spot-on that you just have to laugh. He puts certain feelings into words that you never thought you were feeling before but when you realize that he just put your feelings into words in the funniest way possible, you can’t help but admit it. Of course, the story is a really generalized one and it doesn’t apply to very many subjects of fights in real life, but it’s general enough that it applies to fights in some way. Lots of people will be able to reflect and see themselves in the scenario that Dane Cook talks about and really, you just end up laughing at yourself...

It's about 10 mins but so worth it!!!!! Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z468B8vV6XU

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s humour in the play The Importance of Being Earnest is overall very witty and brought up in a “smartass” fashion. To me the character that plays the part of Algernon appears to be the wittiest character in the play, followed by Jack. To play the part of Algernon, you have to be a very high class character, have an enormous ego, and be clever.
Algernon from the start displays very high intelligence by outsmarting Jack when they talk about the double-character business. He’s always right on top of his game and seems to be one step ahead of the opposition. The tone in which he would talk would be slowly and very obnoxious in the sense that if he commented on anything you said at all, you would already know he was going to be a smartass. I can picture Algernon to be a fancy, rich character that is very luxurious.
The one person I picture right away to be comparable to Algernon is Michael Cane in the movie “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”. Michael Cane and Steve Martin in this movie bet for a woman’s money. Whoever steals all her money first, wins. Cane as his character is a high class, luxurious living person who will never show frustration, only appreciation for a challenge, just like Algernon. They have too much pride in their own being that they are almost ignorant of what is actually happening.
The personality for the person playing the part of Algernon should be a very polite, intelligent, and extraordinarily proper man. He will make no social mistake and will always make sure he’s being polite but is able to let people know they are inferior to him. He does show his ego by constantly outsmarting others and being proud of his “victories”.

Robotic Humans

Of course we all know how people change when they have been to war. Kurt Vonnegut is arguably “crazy” after returning, but he seems to be developing this “crazy” attitude of his during the war. In the beginning of chapter 8, Vonnegut says that “people are discouraged from being characters” (208). During war, people tend to lose track of time, and of who they really are; soldiers who are in battle day in and day out almost become insensitive to reality. They are men forced to take orders, and if disobeyed, they will most likely be executed. They are men, forced to be robots.
Imagine yourself doing the same thing over and over again with no seeming end to whatever it is that you’re doing. Knowing there is no end; time has no significance to you anymore; so much for hours, days, months, and years. During this time your one objective is to kill any man you see of the enemy. When people are ordered to do the same thing over and over again without having any say in what to do, it becomes a system of action, and this is in my opinion where most people lose their character in the war.
The only people that make a difference are usually the ones who are conscious. Derby in this case seems to be a person who keeps a lot to himself. Being a high school teacher, he needs to be very appropriate at all times and an example for his students, but also can’t express himself. When it’s time to speak up, he does. The only people able to gather strength are the ones who aren’t afraid to be themselves and refuse to be robots.

Vonnegut vs Horace

Kurt Vonnegut writes two limericks early on in his book “Slaughterhouse-Five”; the first one, which starts with the line, “There was a young man from Stamboul,” and the second with “My name is Yon Yonson.” (8) Both limericks send us a different message that has to do with time and effort. The young man’s limerick tells about him yelling at his tool and saying it took his wealth, health, and he won’t even pee anymore. The Yong Yonson verse talks about Yon Yonson being asked about his name by people who pass by and he answers with his name. It implies about life being repetitive and never-ending.
Later in the book he refers to these limericks multiple times to briefly remind us of their message. For example, when there is an occurrence that resembles their deeper meaning. On page 14, Vonnegut uses a quote from Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who is known as Horace in English. He was the leading lyric poet of Rome thousands of years ago. The quote Vonnegut used comes from Latin which reads, “Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni.” This can be translated to “Alas, our fleeting years pass away.” All that means is that unfortunately our years pass by so fast that we don’t have enough time to realize it sometimes. I think he used this quote to illustrate that the time that has passed since the war passed by so fast compared to when he was fighting that he didn’t realize how far ahead he was. Maybe also because by the time he visited his friend, he had so many ideas in his head that he had been thinking about what to write for so long that he forgot how long it has taken him to do all these things to get a book together. There’s many different views you can take on it...

Laurenz S

Satire much?

Jane Austen has a reputation of using a gentile satire humor. In her novel Emma, she expresses her humor among several characters, especially in the Box Hill scene. I believe that Emma definitely received the greater portion of her humor in this scene. Satire is defined as irony, sarcasm or ridicule, and Emma clearly gets the ridicule side of it. When they’re about to start their game, Miss Bates jokingly says that it wouldn’t be tough for her to mention three bad qualities of hers. Emma takes this quite seriously and doesn’t like the fact that Miss Bates is getting a lot of her attention. She proceeds to tell Miss Bates that three and only three qualities may be mentioned, no more, no less. Of course, she is implying that Miss Bates has many flaws.
The other person that Austen has granted a satire touch to is Miss Bates herself. She, however, has a much more sarcastic humor. She was almost insulting herself when she was joking about being able to mention bad things involving her own personality. The first scene that was shown to the class was in the room with Emma and Miss Bates was dealing out tea and cake. Meanwhile she was explaining stories to Emma and the others. She kept on rambling about her stories and the girls were barely even listening to her. She was so distracted by her own stories and drawing so much attention to herself that she goes back and forth from handing Emma cake, to going back, and eventually giving her cake.

Quote response

Henri Bergson wrote the following quote, “Society is suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body, because it is a possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates. In short, it is the sign of eccentricity. It is confronted by something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom – scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture.”
This quote really interests me because I can agree with the first part, but as soon as he starts talking about the gestures, I find things become a little arguable. When he writes that society is suspicious of inelasticity of character, body and mind; he makes a really good point. People become very uncomfortable when people don’t change. If someone has a straight face all day long, without laughing or showing any emotion, you may even feel threatened.
People that are “different” from us in such a manner tend to be categorised. We think of them as weird, or odd, maybe even not human. When someone walks by you in a long leather coat, sunglasses, straight face, heavy black boots, black shirts, black pants, everything dark. Chances are you’re going to take a couple of extra steps to go around this person because they are different from what we are used to. Bergson says that when we see a person like this, there is some kind of fear within us that says, please don’t hurt me, or don’t do any bad things; so we result to looking at them with a smile or some gesture of comfort to us. We know smiles to be a thing of comfort, so we refer to them when we see an “out-of-place” person walk around to make us feel safe. I don’t always agree with that because I find in my case, I look away from people I may threatened by not to draw any attention to myself.

-Laurenz S